These are my thoughts on the Hugo-nominated novelettes in 2014. If
you're planning to vote, you may wish not to read these notes until
you have done so. There will also be spoilers here.

The Waiting Stars, Aliette de Bodard: Two narratives in
parallel. Somewhere in deep space, two humans and their AI ship (also
their great-aunt) go to salvage another family ship that had been
captured and mothballed by the enemy; meanwhile, Catherine grows up in
an institution run by people who want to de-programme the children
rescued/stolen from the horrible AI-lovers. The twist is hardly
unexpected, and nor is the other twist, but the story is agreeable.
One side is just a bit too blatantly unsympathetic for this to work
properly. I get the impression the story's set in a universe about
which she's written more, and I wouldn't mind reading some of it, so I
suppose it's done its job. The official etext can't decide whether the
ship graveyard is a yard or a ward, which would be cleverer if it
showed any consistency in the usage; I suspect poor editing.

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, Ted Chiang: Two parallel
narratives again. A modern man ponders on how a new invention will do
away with the need for memory, while a Western African indigene is
taught to read and write by a missionary. Yeah, as soon as you read
that it's obvious where this is going. Surprise me, damn you! I really
do expect more from Ted Chiang than this. All right, the ending isn't
exactly the cheap moral lesson I'd predicted; it's a slightly
different cheap moral lesson. This is a short story scraped out to
novelette size. It will probably win because everyone loves Ted
Chiang, but I really don't get the spark from it that I've had from
other work of his.

The Lady Astronaut of Mars, Mary Robinette Kowal: one of the
astronauts who first landed on Mars, now ageing and living in the
colony there, decides whether to abandon her increasingly-dependent
and dying husband for one last mission. This is another short story
plot really, but the padding, the details of life in this Martian
future, are rather more agreeable than in the Chiang story.

The Exchange Officers, Brad R. Torgerson: two American soldiers
fight, via humanoid drones, to defend an orbital station from a
Chinese takeover. Which feels on the surface like the sort of story
I'd have been reading in an anthology from the 1980s edited by Jerry
Pournelle, except these guys don't seem to have any weapons, which
makes their proposed tactics a bit unclear even if most of the
defenders hadn't been disabled by an initial EMP attack. (And
really, if you expect these things to be able to sit in space for
months or years at a time and then be ready to fight, they're already
EMP-proof just to cope with the environment.) I get the feeling
Torgerson knows a lot about the US military, but rather less about
robotics: balance feedback from the human inner ear doesn't help if
it's not in the thing that's trying to balance, and these days
computers can do it better anyway. And your space station may only be
a few hundred miles up, but your control signal still has to get round
the world to reach it, a far more significant lag. Characters? We
don't need them. And because telling a story in simple order of events
is so terribly old-fashioned, that's not what we get. Not entirely
unpleasant, but really not Hugo material.

Opera Vita Aeterna, Vox Day: an elf-mage is a guest, for Plot
Reasons, at a fantasy-Catholic monastery; in the way of many modern
elves, he's better at everything than the humans; when they're all
killed in his absence, he spends many years illuminating a beautiful
manuscript to commemorate them. The author's hateful politics don't
particularly show up here, in a story with no female or non-white
characters (those of us who've read certain Games Workshop products
are quite able to recognise and ignore the early strains of Alfheim
über alles). It still has nothing to say beyond that quick summary.

Well, at least these are actual science fiction stories, or at least
fantasy (Day, and uninteresting fantasy at that). I enjoyed the
Torgerson but it's doing nothing new; the Kowal goes past without
leaving much impression; the Chiang feels over-engineered; the de
Bodard is imperfect but quite fun. None of them quite gives me the
whack round the head that I think of as a characteristic of Hugo
material, but I'll certainly vote for de Bodard first.

Addendum: the Hugo voting order was Kowal, Chiang, de Bodard, Torgerson,
No Award, Day.